As Trump attacks, WHO warns against politicizing coronavirus if you don’t want ‘many more body bags’

The WHO, the United Nations’ health agency, started sounding the alarm on the outbreak of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, in mid-January, designating the now COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency on Jan. 30 when there were just 8,200 cases in 18 countries across the world. The coronavirus has since wreaked havoc across the globe, spreading to more than 1.4 million people and killing more than 83,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

While WHO officials have praised the U.S. response to the coronavirus, they’ve also been critical of some of Trump’s policies and practices surrounding it. They’ve urged people against calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” as Trump has done, saying that it could unintentionally lead to racial profiling.

Trump said Tuesday thatt he is thinking about withholding funds to the WHO, saying the international agency pushed back on his travel ban from China early in the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s unclear how Trump would do this, however. Congress has already authorized $122 million for the WHO for this fiscal year, and while Trump has proposed $58 million in funding for the agency in fiscal 2021, Congress is unlikely to authorize such a drastic funding cut, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

“For God’s sake, we have lost more than 60,000 citizens of the world. … More than 1 million cases. What are we doing? Is this not enough?” Tedros said. “Even the death of one person is a disaster when we can prevent it.”

Tedros thanked the U.S. for its generous support in the past to fight the HIV pandemic under former President George W. Bush. He called on the U.S., China and the rest of the G-20 nations to come together to fight the pandemic. Even during the Cold War, he said, the U.S. and Russia set aside their differences to work together to fight small pox.

“This is not the one to use for politics. It’s like playing with fire, so more than ever before national unity is important, if we care about our people, if we care about our citizens, please work across party lines, across ideology, across beliefs, across any differences for that matter,” he said. “We need to behave. That’s how we can defeat this virus.”